Dashiell Hammett Read online

  Just once in his life and for a very short time, Hammett moderated his cynical outlook. He fell in love, genuinely, generously, with passion and with a kindness he would never show again. It is not surprising his love was for a young nurse, who cared for him as his mother, Annie, had, who was as proud of him as Annie was. She was Josie Dolan.

  CHAPTER 3

  When the Cushman Sanatorium opened in 1920, 1 there were seven army nurses, but Sam only noticed one, twenty-three-year-old Josephine Annis Dolan. Not only was she exceptionally pretty, with a riot of chestnut curls, but she welcomed patients with a kind smile as if they were co-conspirators.

  People were always taken aback by her beauty. Years later, a former Pinkerton detective met Josie in middle age: “Jose was always lovely to look at. She had a beauty that came from a mixture of goodness and sexuality. That would have counted a great deal with Hammett.” 2

  When Hammett was admitted, he was a sad scarecrow who weighed only 132 pounds, with 100 percent disability from tuberculosis. He flirted, and Josie thought perhaps he was not that ill. He helped her with her ward duties. She thought perhaps he was not that proud.

  “Of all the patients, Samuel seemed to stand out. I thought he was very intelligent and striking—and his sleeping area was always very neat. Also, he was gentle.” He seemed different from the country boys. Though he could hardly walk, he moved with pride. He dressed carefully even when he could wear only pajamas. Even the pajamas were neat. He made his bed in a military style, with a boyish smile. Determined to make up for his lack of schooling, he read every book that was available and took every vocational class granted to him. 3

  Josephine was born in Basin, Montana, in February 1897, the eldest child of Hubert Dolan, a West Virginia miner, and Irish Maggie, ten years younger than he. Maggie was dead at twenty-seven. Hubert drank heavily, then, when forced to return to work, left his three toddlers, Josie, three and a half, Walter, two, and baby Eddie with neighbors. Josie at first tried to take care of her brothers. Butte relatives took in Eddie, but when Hubert died three years after Maggie, Josie and Walter were sent to Montana’s Catholic orphanage in Helena. Montana orphanages thought orphans were morally defective and should scrub sculleries. Josie was lonely, defiant, and frequently punished. One day, they locked her into the coal cellar then forgot about her. That was the day her remorseful aunt Alice Kelly, who already had a houseful of children, decided to visit. The previous night, Maggie had appeared to Alice in a dream, pleading with her to fetch Josie, who was instantly removed to the Kelly house in Anaconda. It was not a big improvement, for Uncle William Kelly, high on his job with the Anaconda Copper Company, regularly abused her. Josie could have told but kept quiet. This was family. Moreover, this family offered tastier food, better clothes, and more hope than the orphanage.

  She got through grade eight at school then quit. Like Sam, Josie needed to escape. She didn’t like blood, she didn’t like death, but she knew nurses were respected. At fifteen, she trained for three years at St James’ Hospital in Butte, then worked at St. Ann’s Hospital before she enlisted in the army as a Red Cross nurse. After the war, she was accepted as a public health nurse first in New Mexico then in Tacoma. By the time she met Hammett, she was a second lieutenant.

  “I outranked Sam, so he had to salute me,” she said, still needing respect. 4 She did get Sam’s approval if not ultimately his fidelity.

  Sam understood Josie’s story. Admired her pluck and felt compassion and loyalty, the same emotions he felt for Annie. Josie would ground him as Annie had done.

  In Tacoma, Cushman had taken over ramshackle school buildings, laboratories, a lumber store, and a blacksmith’s shop that was used by the former Cushman School for Puyallup Indians, hardly suitable as sites for treating respiratory diseases. Together, the seven nurses and four medical officers cared for a hundred needy veterans there.

  In his last, unfinished novel, Tulip, Hammett recalled the friendly hospital as so sloppily run that patients could easily obtain passes for visits to Tacoma. As Sam’s health improved, he began to court Josie seriously. They ate at good restaurants then walked and talked in the park. Sam obtained a pass to Seattle, where he rented an apartment for privacy. Within two months, they were lovers. Josie, overwhelmed by love, never believed that Sam’s tubercular diagnosis had been confirmed. However, medical reports from the time said Sam was sick beyond repair. In 1921, he was transferred to Camp Kearney near San Diego for its warmer, drier climate. But the young, ardent patient had found sanctuary with a desirable, caring woman. From his new billet, he wrote to his beloved:

  27 Sept [i.e., February] 5

  Dear Little Fellow—

  We had just enough excitement on the trip down to keep away monotony, and landed here yesterday afternoon in pretty good shape . . .

  . . . the going hasn’t been any too smooth so far. Before we had our bags unpacked they flashed a set of rules on us . . . but we have broken all but a couple and none of us have been shot yet . . .

  But that’s enough of the Kearn[e]y talk—now for a little Cushman.

  Which lunger are you taking out now and dragging into town when he should be sleeping? . . .

  When you answer this tonight give me all the latest Cushman gossip—just the same as if we were sitting in the Peerless Grill.

  Love

  Hammett

  Everyone called her Jose, except Sam. For five years, he called her his Little Fellow, his Dear, his Dearest, his Dearest Woman, Little Handful, Little Chap, Lady, Nurse, and Boss. Only when his life changed in November 1926 did he, too revert to Jose.

  The Little Fellow did not write back. Days passed with no letter. Hammett wrote again:

  Friday [probably 4 March 1921]

  Dear Lady—

  I didn’t intend doing this—writing you a second letter before I got an answer to my first—but that’s the hell of being in love with a vamp, you do all sorts of things. Before long, most likely, I’ll have fallen into the habits of your other victims and will be writing you frequent and foolish letters. . . . And then I’ll be getting so I can’t eat or sleep, and will lose my immortal soul lying to you about the 15 and 18 hour naps I’m taking and the pounds of meat I am eating—for I’d never admit that I allowed you to interfere with my comfort and health. You’d enjoy that too much!

  Sam wrote more often, and more openly than was usual for him. Josephine shyly held back, yet already she trusted him. His missives were flirtatious, funny, affectionate. He told her that his chums said “Little Miss Dolan” was a wonderful person, though the “regular and usual opinion” was that in comparison with the Little Handful “the Virgin Mary was a wild woman.”

  Sam recalled their good times. The worst part of the day was when the time was 7:40 p.m. and he knew that he should be in front of the hospital, in the rain, waiting for “Josephine Anna.” By 6:00 p.m. on Jose’s afternoon off, he knew he should be standing on the corner in front of People’s Store, cursing her because she was fifteen minutes late. The rain reminded him of the times they had spent at the bridge “staging our customary friendly, but now and then a bit rough, dispute over the relative merits of ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

  This was not the Hammett of later years, violent with starlets and even with Lillian Hellman, who feared his violence. Here the writer sounded gentle. He missed the Little Fellow’s pert smile. He still awaited a photograph: “If I’m ever to get it I’ll most likely have to come up and take it away from you. Maybe that’s what I should have done about something else I wanted.”

  What he wanted now was her company. Was she still thinking of leaving Cushman? Could he persuade her to come to California? Had she answered his other letter? “God help you if you didn’t.”

  Finally, the Little Fellow wrote back. It was March 9. He was “tickled pink,” as he hadn’t been sure she would write. He felt as if he had the world by its tail. He assured her that he was being remarkably faithful and admitted he loved her like a damn fool.

 
Hammett would always be better at expressing emotions in letters than in speech, but in this first love affair he admitted his feelings without self-mockery. “I may have done a lot of things that weren’t according to scripture, but I love Josephine Anna Dolan—and have since about the sixth of January—more than anything in Christ’s world. . . . You can’t be missing me any more than I’m missing you, Sweet. It’s pretty tough on these lonesome nights.” He finished unequivocally: “I deserve all the love you can spare me! And I want a lot more than I deserve.”

  This emotion is unmistakable, unambiguous, a tender streak rarely shown in his later relationship with Hellman, except in some of his wartime letters to her.

  On March 13, he wrote “Dear Nurse,” telling Jose that he had nearly begun his letter with “Dear Mama,” as her last note was filled with such motherly advice. Jose’s instructions about taking the cure could have come from Annie. The letter was a harbinger. Jose would be as unremittingly devoted to him and as able to survive as Annie had been.

  Sam wrote that this was the first time he had genuinely loved a woman that way. “That sounds funny but it may be the truth.” A week later, he uncharacteristically expressed insecurity. “I never could figure out whether you liked me a little (I mean ‘love’—I wouldn’t give a God-damn to have you ‘like’ me) or were just giving me your evenings because you hadn’t anything else much to do with ’em.” He went into town frequently but came back “as much a virgin as when I went.” Temporarily, he stopped seeing whores. 6

  Later, when they lived together, Sam wrote a story about a soldier making love to a nurse. He called Jose “Evelyn” and called himself “Slim” (his nickname from the staff and patients). In two sketches, Hammett captured some of their relationship but toughened it up. He wrote the first sketch at 20 Monroe Street, San Francisco, on October 4, 1926, where illness had temporarily separated him from his wife and children.

  We would leave the buildings in early darkness, walk a little way across the desert and go down into a small canyon where four trees grouped around a level spot. The night-dampness settling on earth that had cooked since morning would loose the fragrance of ground and plant around us. We would lie there until late in the night, our nostrils full of world-smell, the trees making irregular map-boundary division among the stars. Our love seemed dependent on not being phrased. It seemed if one of us had said, “I love you,” the next instant it would have been a lie. So we loved and cursed one another merrily, ribaldly, she usually stopping her ears in the end because I knew more words. 7

  Hammett’s detached understatement is transparent in the notion that once an emotion is named, nailed down, it will then be false. Jose, young and guileless though she was, seemed able to accept Sam’s gradual mask of verbal indifference and understood that it hid some of the emotions he had expressed openly in their earliest years.

  In this first sketch, there is a distinct contradiction in tone between Sam’s letters to the Little Fellow that were written at the time and this fictional fragment written later. His witty, gentle tone in the correspondence changes to an acid quality in the story.

  By the time Sam wrote that sketch, their passionate courtship had altered into an affectionate domesticity, but that may only be part of the reason for the literary change. Here also was an emerging writer trying techniques.

  Hammett, dissatisfied with this fictional version, later revised it, sharpened the landscapes so that the trees “made maps among the stars.” In “Women Are a Lot of Fun Too” (undated), he removed the nurse’s prettiness and concentrated on an erotic wrangle. Though Sam’s letters to Josie were intensely romantic, to make Evelyn pretty would openly reveal this. He was not about to write romance, even if he felt able to live it.

  I was going to miss Evelyn. She wasn’t pretty, but she was a lot of fun, a small-bodied wiry girl with a freckled round face that went easily to smiling. We used to leave the hospital around lights-out time, walk a little way across the desert, and go down to a small canyon where four trees grouped round a level spot. . . . We would lie there until late. . . . smelling the world and loving and cursing one another. Neither of us ever said anything about seriously loving the other. Our love-making was a thing of rough and tumble athletics and jokes and gay repartee and cursing. She usually stopped her ears in the end because I knew more words. 8

  In San Diego, Sam missed his male friends who broke Cushman rules without detection. Some played poker; some smuggled in drink. Sam’s fellow patient Snohomish Whitey even committed strong-arm robberies near the hospital, then escaped back to his sickbed. The admiring Sam fictionalized Whitey first in an untitled story, then in “Women Are a Lot of Fun Too.”

  “Whitey shouldn’t have hit the doctor, but he did. He poked him in the fat mouth and the doctor fell down on the board walk and squealed.” Hammett’s respect for the tough but powerless guy showed when Whitey cursed the doctor because he wouldn’t get up to be hit again.

  The nursing staff saw Whitey as “a filthy ignorant beast who doesn’t know any better,” while they saw the narrator as an educated man who knew a great deal better. For years, Hammett retained his liking for rough, boozy men, partly based on envy of the thin, frail invalid for the physically powerful male.

  In the twenties, Hammett saw all doctors as authority figures who could be malevolent or, as in his own case, hopelessly inept. Whitey represented the rage of the ineffective against those in authority.

  When Sam first met Whitey, men died around them in the merciless heat, but Whitey appeared fearless despite (like Sam) coughing up blood. Much later, Hammett inserted Whitey into his last manuscript, Tulip, where Whitey Kaiser became “a powerfully built squat blond Alaskan with most of the diseases known to man; he could hit like a pile driver, but his knucklebones would crumble like soda crackers.” 9

  Twenty years after first meeting Whitey, when Hammett was back in the army during World War II and compared his sick, prematurely aged frame with the bodies of his young, fit fellow soldiers, he signed several letters “Whitey.”

  Separated by miles but joined to Jose by his letters, Sam, at twenty-six, already wrote well. Though Jose, twenty-three, was pregnant, neither of them seemed to be aware of her condition. Several notes, however, suggested that Jose felt ill. On April 30, 1921, Sam pictured her extremely sick, even dying. He went through the emotions of a man in love.

  When Jose discovered her pregnancy, she quit her job, went home to Anaconda, coped as proudly as she could with her family’s hostility, and wrote to Hammett. They arranged their marriage by mail. Of the two important letters that Hammett’s daughter Jo knew Jose had saved but that subsequently were lost, one was from Sam to Jose on learning she was pregnant, the other was to plan their San Francisco reunion. The tone of the notes that preceded and followed the two missing letters was identical, both full of passionate love. Jo’s family confidently assumed that Sam’s desire to marry Jose and bring up their child was equal to hers. He had already written in March: “I really like to have you tell me what to do and what not to do. It’s like being married to you.” 10

  Discharged from Camp Kearney, he traveled to Seattle, where he lived briefly at 1117 Third Avenue. Then he moved to San Francisco to search for an apartment for them. 11 In June 1921, he rented a room at 120 Ellis Street. When Jose arrived in early July, he discreetly placed her in the nearby Golden West Hotel. On Thursday, July 7, handing her a bouquet of flowers, he took her by cab to St. Mary’s Cathedral, where, despite Jose’s Catholic observances, they were married in the rectory rather than at the altar. He had already warned her: “I haven’t any God except Josephine.” 12 Only when the ceremony was over did Hammett confess he was baptized a Catholic, so they could have had the religious wedding Jose wanted. Despite that first ripple of disagreement, in some strange way he took their marriage as seriously as she did. Though he did not long remain faithful, they never legally divorced. Until the end of their lives, she called herself and thought of herself as Mrs. Hammett, and Hamme
tt told friends and later an irritated Lillian Hellman that he thought of her that way, too.

  Their first apartment, at 620 Eddy Street, overlooking a park, was four blocks from the public library, where Hammett read Anatole France, Flaubert, ancient Icelandic sagas, and other works from Aristotle to Henry James, to whom he later attributed his ideas about style. He understood the grim, the greedy, the laconic, but now he seized on sophistication. He had good judgment, a flair for sorting literature from trash but so far no aptitude for making money.

  Their three rooms cost $45 a month. His disability pension had been downgraded from 100 percent, worth $80 a month, to 50 percent, worth only $40 a month. Unable to pay rent, buy food, or manage a full-time job, Hammett returned part-time to Pinkerton’s, in San Francisco’s Flood Building, making about six dollars a day. He found the work enthralling, but what he later “remembered” from the time were four crucial cases that he may not have investigated, though he would take full credit.

  Hammett’s “memories” are looked on with fond indulgence by readers and critics alike. He was a fine detective, runs the myth, and therefore he almost certainly solved the cases. However, the only certifiable fact is that he was employed by Pinkerton’s at the time.

  The first sensational case was the Fatty Arbuckle rape and murder. Arbuckle, a popular film comedian, was accused in news reports of raping starlet Virginia Rappe in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel. Newspapers claimed that, when the grossly overweight Arbuckle climbed on top of Rappe’s slim body, he ruptured her bladder and killed her. Arbuckle’s defense team hired Pinkerton’s for two trials. The first (September 22 to December 4, 1921) ended in a hung jury; the second (January 11 to February 3, 1922) acquitted Fatty on the grounds that Rappe’s bladder problems were caused by venereal disease and a botched abortion. The sole evidence for Hammett’s participation in the first trial was his own allusion to “the funniest case I ever worked on. . . . In trying to convict him everybody framed everybody else” that was picked up by the New York Herald Tribune, November 12, 1933.